In the following essay, Morson discusses Bakhtin's fascination with indeterminism and his concept of “open time” in narrative.

We live forward, but we understand backward.

—Kierkegaard

Bakhtin must surely be regarded as the most remarkable modern thinker to examine time in narrative.1 For him, the problem was no mere exercise in literary theory. Rather, it was a way to examine ultimate questions—or in the Russian phrase, “accursed” questions—about human existence. In this respect, his work is representative of the Russian tradition, in which literature and criticism served as forms of—a skeptic would say, substitutes for—philosophy. In this Russian view, the task of philosophy is to examine the relation of ideas to the way people live.2 Novels are a supreme form of philosophy because, unlike the terribly thin...